The Curse of Babylon (54 page)

I strained to hear the low conversation. From right to left, they were passing by not twenty feet away, and all I needed was for the officer to speak up a little or turn in our direction. I thought at first they’d pass completely out of hearing. But there was a sudden noise of more horses approaching from our left and the men sat up straight.

Rado leaned closer. ‘How big were you told the escort would be?’ he asked. I pressed my head against his for silence. said the new arrivals were about a dozen men on horses similar to our own. So far as I could tell, they had no armour. The hairs on the back of my neck were beginning to stand up.

The officer rode forward a few paces and raised his voice. ‘Have you found anything yet?’ he asked.

‘Nothing to scare whatever old woman issued your orders,’ the man in charge of the larger band jeered in the rough Persian of a highlander. He leaned to the right and spat. ‘But we found a real old woman. She told us she saw two blond boys on horseback stealing a goat.’

‘Obviously not locals,’ the officer grunted. ‘They may indicate nothing but I’ll report back.’

The highlander spat again. ‘Good riders, she said – too good for escaped slaves. But too young, I got the impression, to be western federates.’

‘You made sure to kill her afterwards?’ the officer asked anxiously. ‘You know the orders.’

The highlander laughed unpleasantly. ‘We killed the whole fucking village. Shame we had to leave all their food behind.’

‘Good,’ the officer said. ‘Nothing must be left to chance.’ He stopped and looked sharply right. Someone or something had started a light shower of stones down the far wall of this minor pass. He clutched harder on his reins and got out his sword. He began a babbled charm to ward off evil. Even before I saw his sword’s dull glitter, the highlander and his men were dashing on horseback up an incline steeper and rockier than the one Rado and I had come down. Together, they reached a point about fifty yards up, before stopping for a quiet laugh. The highlander was first back to the officer, what may have been a rabbit skewered on his long sword.

‘Very good,’ the officer said with a recovery of dignity. He put his sword away. ‘Don’t bust a gut over it but if you find either of the blond boys, try to take them alive. And remember the order not to split up.’

Eboric and his brother had the horses already loaded when we got back. Now, they were fighting tears of disgrace as they covered the fire with a mass of tiny stones. This wasn’t the time for flogging their arses raw. Nor would I punish them. ‘It was just bad luck,’ I’d said after telling all three what I’d heard. ‘And it may not even be that,’ I’d added. ‘After all, we have learned something.’

I was right. We
had
learned something. If only I could be sure what it was. I put wilder conjectures aside and turned to Rado. ‘The questions are piling up,’ I said, wondering how to express them without sounding panicky. I looked at the pebbles he’d arranged on the flat rock. The moon was past its zenith and each stone and heap of stones cast a shadow. ‘It’s no surprise the escort should be made up of Persian regulars. But why night scouting parties, and why so far out? And who’s being chased by them?’ I fell silent. I’d thought at first they were after me. That would suggest Shahin had already met the escort and he was guessing I’d not be far behind. But the ruling out of blond hair had been too emphatic. Also, if they were just looking for me, why the murder of anyone who’d seen them?

I reached forward to touch one of the double lines of pebbles at the top left extremity of Rado’s map. ‘Are you absolutely sure this is the only pass that Shahin can use?’ I asked in Slavic – I’d more chance of a frank answer if no one else could understand.

He nodded. ‘I’ve been looking for days at the shape of the mountains,’ he answered in Latin. ‘Never mind your painted map – we’ve seen nowhere else they could use. As for the escort, there’s no other pass that makes sense.’ The two boys nodded vigorously. I could have interrupted here to ask how they knew anything about the location of the passes, let alone their width. But I’d chosen them for the skills they’d learned before they were taken. I’d seen no reason so far to doubt I’d chosen right. If Rado’s confidence weren’t enough, the boys had been scampering all over the place. While he’d been keeping me from falling off my own horse, they had been over every inch of the ground ten miles either side of our journey and ten miles ahead. I nodded grimly and waited.

‘The escort might be lost,’ he continued with a frown. ‘But those rough men on horseback are like my people. They
can’t
get lost – not enough to be this far off course.’

We could stand here debating all night and still not get anywhere. I looked at the mounds of little stones and wondered which one represented our hill. ‘If, shall we say, a dozen of your people were hunting us,’ I asked, ‘what would they do?’

Rado pointed at a different mound and turned matter of fact. ‘Given a few dozen of us, we’d keep a watch on these paths – here and here – and we’d send lines of horsemen over each of these hills. There’d be boys with dogs going before them. You’d need to be a mountain fox to escape that kind of dragnet.’ He began moving pieces of gravel about in a way that set my heart sinking faster than the moon. ‘Just a dozen, though – and without orders for an all-out search – and we’d scout round till morning in the most obvious places. After that, we’d keep to the highest points and look down to see if anyone was moving.’

I moved to look at the shadowed pattern of stones from another angle and tried to superimpose on it my own compound map. I pointed to the intersection of the passes and traced a line to our hill. ‘We can take a risk once we’re out of this immediate area,’ I said. ‘Until then, we’ll see how far we can get by night. We can sleep once the sun is up.’ Rado nodded.

I was about to issue another of my ‘instructions,’ when Eboric’s brother came and plucked at my cloak. ‘There’s a line of horsemen coming up from the north,’ he whispered. ‘You can’t hear them. But, if you look hard enough, you can see the moving shadows.’

Chapter 54

We spent the remaining hours of darkness jumping at our own shadows. Once or twice, we heard men calling to each other at a great distance. But, once Rado had guided us over a seemingly impossible ridge, we moved steadily forward, now entering one of the more sheltered upland areas. Here we passed over expanses of scrubby grass that soaked up the sound of hooves. There were even little copses of trees to hide us if required.

Then, as the sky gradually turned blue and the sun began moving down the highest mountain behind us, Eboric’s brother hurried back to us.

‘Smell of burning ahead,’ he reported.

I’d already noticed. ‘Was it round here that you stole the goat?’ I asked. He nodded. Rado and I looked at each other. He tickled the right ear of his horse and moved silently forward. I gave my own horse the slightest touch of spur and held on to avoid being thrown.

We were going uphill again and we got off to lead the horses once we’d reached the line of stunted trees that hid from us the remains of the smoking village.

‘Well, someone had to carry all the food away,’ I said. I sat on the remains of a stone wall and tried not to look at the three children who’d been butchered a few yards from my outstretched feet. The smallest had been dashed, head first, against a rock. The grass was patchy with dried blood and gobbets of brain. The problem with war, I’ve always insisted, is that it substitutes too much chance for the game of skill that is diplomacy. The truth is I’ve never liked the random killing that war involves. Within reason, soldiers on the field of battle are fair game. It’s the non-combatants I feel sorry for. By the look of things, these villagers had been caught as they sat down to their evening meal. They’d all been killed without mercy. Some of them had tried to fight back. Some had been tortured. It had made no difference. They were all dead now.

Rado pulled a woman’s dress down to make her body respectable. ‘You did say, Master, that the highlanders weren’t able to carry the food away.’ He sat beside me and watched the boys as they went about filling buckets from the village stream. My people had run out of people to kill and rape and things to burn a century before I was born. Regardless of the wider questions of right and justice, I’d grown up in a world of small farming communities and it was natural to pity these unfortunates. Rado and the boys came from bandit races. They’d been too young to join in the killing before they were taken. At the same time, they’d been fed and brought up on the proceeds of collective murder. Pity must have been as alien to them as it was natural to me. The boys were less put out by the horrors we’d stumbled across than I’d been by that body outside my palace. They were much more interested in getting water for the horses and in seeking out anything edible that hadn’t been carried away.

To be fair, Rado was on the edge of disapproval. Our first sight of death had been something so fiendish, and so plainly inspired by joy in suffering, that he’d let his horse rear sideways. He looked at the dead face of one of the children. ‘They could have used these people to carry the food for them,’ he said. He clenched his fists and looked up at the sky.

I sat in gloomy thoughts until the sound of buzzing flies became a cause of depression in itself. ‘We know there’s more than one village in these parts,’ I said. ‘Or someone else might have come along afterwards for the foraging.’ I stared at the jumble of animal prints and cart grooves that led to the south. A distancing tactic I’d often found useful was to see death as evidence of something else. ‘It must have been a big party to justify so big a foraging operation and so far off its probable course. How big do you suppose Shahin’s escort might be?’

Rado continued looking at the open eyes. ‘It’s not an escort but an army,’ he said quietly.

‘A big army too,’ I agreed after a long internal sigh. ‘And you know we’ll need to see it for ourselves.’ I was holding my linen map. I spread it on the grass before us. I’ve said our agreed plan was to head straight for the Larydia Pass, and hurry along it, so we could creep down behind Shahin from his right. I drew a finger along the big pass without a name. Looking there would take us at least a day off course. ‘Tell me, Rado – how long would it take one or both of the boys to get a message to Trebizond?’

He looked away from the map and stared fixedly at the burnt shell of what had been a little church. I made my own calculations. The fleet should by now have arrived at Trebizond. It should be carrying whatever forces Heraclius had been able to draw away from the defence of Thrace. Even without the Great Augustus in charge, it would take an age to get everyone this far south. If what we could see about us, however, was general between here and the big pass without a name, it was much more than an escort Shahin was hurrying to meet.

‘Eboric is the youngest and lightest,’ Rado said after his long silence. ‘Alone, he could be back on the main road within five days. With money and a sealed permit from you to use the posts, he could be in Trebizond two days after that.’

Seven days back to Trebizond! I’d guessed their grudging praise every evening had been clever jollying along. I’d thought, even so, I was doing better than that.

Rado looked me in the face. ‘And the Lady Antonia?’ he asked slowly.

I looked back at him. I could have given him a curt instruction to help get the horses under cover. He’d have obeyed and not raised this matter again. But, young as I was, I’d already freed slaves by the hundred and kept many close by me afterwards. Rado had come to a moment I’d seen again and again, and only regretted when I didn’t see it. It was as if I were watching the last taint of slavery fade from his spirit. It was time to start treating him as a man.

‘If you are serious about joining the army,’ I said, ‘I will get you started as a junior staff officer – once, that is, you’ve learned to read and write and to understand Greek. The hardest thing you’ll then learn isn’t obedience to orders. You’ve had enough experience of that and, much as you hated it sometimes, it was always fundamentally easy. So long as you take it seriously, authority is harder. It dumps on you an endless series of decisions that affect the lives of others. Many of these decisions involve setting aside personal considerations.

‘You know well enough I’m not soldierly material. But I do help govern this Empire. We came out here on a personal rescue mission that involved ending a possible threat to the Empire’s security.’ I waved at another of the bodies and at another that had already been pulled about by some scavenging beast. ‘You can imagine as well as I can what may be coming through that pass. I don’t know if we have the forces to drive it back. But our duty is to do our personal best. You asked yesterday if you had become a Greek. The plainest answer is that we are both Greeks – by circumstances and the law of nations, if not by birth. These are our people and there are tens of thousands more along that army’s line of march.’